1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates to a display method for an electronic dictionary for representing information etc. relating to translation and words corresponding to input words in English to Japanese, Japanese to English, Japanese or English etc. to be displayed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in an electronic dictionary for displaying information for translation, parts of speech, and synonyms, model sentences, etc., for input words, first of all, characters are input while looking at a display screen, then an execute button for carrying out a search is pressed to change displayed characters, and information for the translation, etc., of the word is displayed on a display screen.
With this type of dictionary, particularly an English to Japanese dictionary, the fact there is a search for idiomatic phrases, model sentences, etc., is useful, but particularly in the model sentence search there is the problem that it takes a long time to perform a search while picking model sentences within a translation, which means that it is not possible to perform a model sentence search at high speed.
Also, for example, in the case of having a plurality of dictionaries, there is a rule that a necessary search is carried out sequentially for each dictionary, and so there is a problem that it takes time and effort.
The present invention has been conceived in view of the above described problems, and is intended to provide an electronic dictionary that can perform model sentence searches at high speed and that can search through a plurality of dictionaries at the same time.
A first aspect of the present invention for solving the above described problems is an electronic dictionary provided with dictionary data having translations corresponding to word entries and sub-information comprising, model sentences and idiomatic phrases relating to the word entries, and translations of the model sentences and idiomatic phrases, wherein
at least the model sentence data of the sub-information are extracted from the dictionary data itself and are held as sub-dictionary data, and a pointer is provided at a position in the dictionary data itself where the sub-information is embedded, and associates respective sub-information with the sub-dictionary data.
In a second aspect of the present invention, the dictionary data contain a plurality of dictionary data items, and the sub-information data is a single item of data.
A third aspect of the present invention is the electronic dictionary of the first or second aspect, in which the sub-dictionary data is provided with model sentence and idiomatic phrase lists.
A fourth aspect of the present invention is the electronic dictionary of the third aspect, in which the lists are made up of words broken down from the model sentences and idiomatic phrases, and each of these words are sorted in a state where restorable restoration data is affixed to each of the model sentences and idiomatic phrases.
A fifth aspect of the present invention is the electronic dictionary of the third or fourth aspects, provided with keyword search means for searching model sentences and idiomatic phrases using the sub-dictionary data.
With the electronic dictionary of the present invention, data for idiomatic phrases and model sentences are extracted from dictionary data and held, which makes it possible to search idiomatic phrases and model sentences, particularly model sentences, at high speed. Also, by appropriately devising the data structure of the idiomatic phrases and model sentences, it will become possible to further increase the speed, and also to reduce the required memory region considerably. Also, by collecting the idiomatic phrase and model sentence data together in a single item and holding it, it is possible to search through model sentences and idiomatic phrases in a plurality of dictionaries together at high speed.